wattpad com

January 4, 2025

Imagine a digital campfire where 90 million readers and writers swap chapters instead of ghost stories. Open the orange‑logo app and you’re in a live slush‑pile that sometimes spits out Hollywood blockbusters.

TL;DR
Wattpad.com started in 2006 as a mobile reading experiment and grew into a 90‑million‑strong storytelling jungle. It feeds studios with fan‑fic‑turned‑franchises, pays top writers up to $25 k, and just survived a big shake‑up—killing DMs and tightening moderation—after being bought by Korean giant Naver for $600 million.

Quick Backstory

Two Toronto engineers, Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen, built Wattpad in 2006 when “reading on your phone” sounded as weird as “watching Netflix on a fridge.” Their bet on mobile stuck; by 2020, 80 percent of traffic came from phones and tablets. (en.wikipedia.org)

The Numbers That Matter

Monthly crowd: about 90 million people in 2025, chewing through billions of reading minutes. (go-beyond.biz, wired.com)
Uploads: north of 665 million stories—enough pages to wallpaper Saturn’s rings. (en.wikipedia.org)
Demographic sweet spot: mostly Gen Z women, which explains the endless feed of romance tropes, K‑pop crushes, and vampire quarterbacks. (en.wikipedia.org)

From Fan Fiction to Box Office

Remember Anna Todd’s After? It began as Harry‑Styles fan fiction on Wattpad, racked up a billion reads, landed a book deal, and now sits on Netflix as a four‑film franchise. (wired.com, goodnovel.com)
That pipeline—fan clicks ➜ data ➜ studio pitch—turned Wattpad into a low‑risk idea factory. Paramount, Netflix, and Philippine broadcaster TV5 have all pulled titles straight from user shelves. (techcrunch.com)

Big Business Moves

Naver, the South‑Korean parent of Webtoon, snapped up Wattpad for roughly $600 million in 2021. Think Marvel buying Wattpad’s multiverse of rom‑coms and slow‑burn dramas. The pitch: pair Webtoon’s comics data with Wattpad’s prose data, then shotgun IP across streaming, print, and gaming. (techcrunch.com)
To grease that machine, Wattpad launched Studios back in 2016—an in‑house label that sifts through reader stats, surfaces “story DNA,” and brokers first‑look deals (Sony Pictures, Universal, Huayi Brothers). (techcrunch.com)

The Ups and Downs of Moderation

Scale brings headaches. In 2024 Wattpad axed direct messages after grooming allegations and low usage claims—goodbye private chat, hello public comments. (theverge.com, itechpost.com)
Around the same time, users complained about a new moderation bot that nuked innocent stories and “shadow‑banned” rankings. Wattpad admitted the algorithm still needs tuning—proof that bias just moves from editors to code. (fanficable.com, pdfs.semanticscholar.or)

Why Writers Keep Coming Back

Money helps. The Creator Program, rolled out in 2022, pays select authors up to $25 000 and adds perks like “Engaged Readers” analytics. It’s peanuts next to Big‑Five advances but huge for an aspiring novelist in Manila or Manchester. (techcrunch.com)
Beyond cash, real‑time reader feedback works like caffeine. Drop a cliff‑hanger at 2 a.m.; wake up to 400 screaming comments. Traditional publishing can’t match that dopamine drip.

Growing Pains and Layoffs

Wattpad isn’t bullet‑proof. Economic jitters led to a 15 percent staff cut in 2023 and another 10 percent in early 2024. Naver insists the downsizing “focuses resources,” but insiders say every reorg slows feature rollouts. (techcrunch.com)

What’s Next

The roadmap looks like this:

• Cross‑platform IP farm – mash prose, comics, and K‑drama data to predict the next Bridgerton.

• Better moderation – algorithmic triage plus more human reviewers to avoid accidental purges.

• Richer creator perks – think Patreon‑style tiers layered on Paid Stories.
  Investors like the flywheel; 150 million monthly users across Webtoon + Wattpad give Naver breathing room to experiment. (ir.webtoon.com)

Bottom line: Wattpad is still the world’s loudest open‑mic night for storytelling—messy, addictive, occasionally life‑changing. Whether you’re hunting for a midnight werewolf romance or the next teen blockbuster, the campfire’s still burning.